The issues related to elderly people are currently being studied by many disciplines, including biology, medicine, psychology and sociology. The problems that aging creates in societies are covered in different ways by scientists specializing in different fields. Social scientists focus on, inter alia, the social scope of activities carried out by elderly people. The said issues also fall in the areas of interest of professionals who create information systems and technologies dedicated to elderly people. Thus, what has been developed in order to meet their interests and to respond to a dynamic process of aging within societies is a concept of an ICT platform designed to increase the activity of elderly people. The platform is dedicated to members of local communities and it can be used to foster entrepreneurship, personal fulfillment and activation in the area of social life. The paper presents both the goals and the concept of such a platform as well as its information structure and model of implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a proprietary methodology and model to generate a “cybersecurity transformation workplan” for large organizations that can improve their cybersecurity posture. The key input is based on risk-based assessment or maturity-based questionnaires depending on existing governance processes and available information. The original scoring can be then used to prioritize a portfolio of all possible initiatives by selecting the ones that are missing from typical foundation elements or would have high potential impact in relation to required investment and effort. Additional constraints such as budget limitation and FTE availability, logical sequencing and time requirements could be added to ensure effective use of company resources and actionability of the recommendations. The Gantt-like output would ease the burden on the security teams by providing an individualized set of activities to be implemented to improve risk posture.

The article describes the economic, organisational and technological reasons for implementing VDI solutions (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) in the learning centers of academic institutions. It presents also major disadvantages, limitations and challenges of this technology. The comparison of total costs of previous solution (PC) and VDI technology has been also discussed. In addition to the benefits, limitations and costs analysis, a case study of the implementation of a model solution at the Wroclaw University of Economics was presented, which includes almost 400 zero client terminals and over 500 virtualised systems available to students in 12 laboratories. The authors were the originators of the concept of VDI implementation at this University and leaders of the project team. The article also presents selected experiences from project implementation and comments, the discussion of which may be crucial for the successful implementation of presented solutions.

One of the key challenges for the next several years is to face, especially in highly developed countries, the problem of aging and its impact on the general quality of citizens’ life. Due to this trend, the Authors have presented a concept of ICT platform aimed at increasing the activity of people at retirement age. It is dedicated to members of local communities, can be used to support entrepreneurship, self-fulfilment and activation in the field of independent social life. During the realization of the project, the Authors have noticed the different business requirements of senior citizens. They were described in the article together with respective technological innovations which were implemented in the ActGo-Gate platform as an answer to these challenges and requirements.

In much of the world, particularly the developed world, there’s a growing aging population. Our work focuses on user experience and its impact on user interface design of web-based applications for elderly people. The paper presents the set of aging-centered user interface design guidelines. An initial collection of guidelines was first developed through an extensive review of the human-computer interaction and aging-oriented literature and through applying a series of classification methods. Then the Authors proposed an assessment framework, which could be used as an universal tool to evaluate the web-based system according the user interfaces dedicated for elderly people. The detailed guidelines were grouped into 7 categories which were granted with appropriate importance weights. In the next section ActGo-Gate platform was presented as a web-based application dedicated for activating and supporting elderly people. Finally, the user interface of the system was evaluated according the proposed criteria.

e-Marketplaces for services have faced many challenges in the last few years. Many factors, including user
expectations, service specificity or technological development, influence the scope of requirements for
integrated solutions on that market. Such an integration can help in creating the place in the cyberspace, where
any user obtain an access to any service he or she actually needs. However, the integration isn’t an easy task,
especially in such a diversified environment. That is why there is a need to find a suitable way of integrating
the service e-marketplaces. Using loose coupling and WOA principles can make this task easier, what was
proved during the real-life experiment, using the “consortium research” method. In the paper authors proposed
the concept of integration of service e-marketplaces that bases on three foundations: user interface, data &
business logic and security. In that context authors described the integration procedure which takes into
account not only the classic software lifecycle, but also agile development principles. Having such
foundations, verification of this procedure on the example from ActGo-Gate research project was performed.
The high-level architecture of the project IT solution was presented and the way of integration of the offer
synchronization process was described.

In current world, organizations need to adapt to the changing business environment. They decide to conduct projects that result with new business processes, new products or services. Very often the goal of the project is to streamline specific area of company or a whole business. The projects become a very complex set of activities that require a sophisticated IT tools to support the efficiency of all the actions. Probably none single software application is able to handle every aspect of the project. That is why the authors decided to identify the kinds of software necessary for supporting the project and choose the applications that from their perspective can aid specific project activities. We have to remember that projects can generate a significant amount of data. If we are able to transform data into relevant information, we can maximize the possibility of success (both project and organization). In this paper authors propose the foundation of a complex platform supporting project management and execution with an emphasis on the analytical and reporting part by usage of Business Intelligence and Big Data technologies. Evaluation of such a platform is the subject for the future work.

There is a wealth of evidence that contemporary landscape of software development has been resisting the
disciplined, rigorous, formally managed, architecture-driven, forward-engineering practices. The whole
field of traditional software engineering needs a re-definition alongside the practices widely used in
production of modern software systems, in particular service-oriented cloud-based applications. This paper
argues that contemporary software engineering must re-focus and re-define its theoretical foundations and
base it on acknowledgment that quality software and systems can (and by and large should) be constructed
using principles of resultant architectures and roundtrip engineering.

The purpose of the paper is to create a profile of an IT product, using IT tools to collect and to analyse
information and enable communication between elderly people to support and activate them. PEST Analysis
method was used to determine different factors of influence on the domain of elderly people activation and
support Having evaluated the factors and defined the product characteristics, the Authors focused on
defining the profile of the IT product by referring the aforementioned characteristics to the structure of the
product in the marketing understanding thereof.

The paper proposes a new meta-architecture as a reference model for developing service-oriented systems and applications. The seven-layer meta-architecture is called STCBMER (Smart Client - Template - Bean - Controller - Mediator - Entity - Resource). The purpose of it is to reduce software complexity and ensure the quality of adaptability defined as the degree to which an information system or application is difficult to understand, maintain and evolve. The main difficulty stems from complex interactions (dependencies) between system elements. The dependencies can be minimized if the system under development adheres to the architectural design and can be verified by analysing the implementation code. The paper reinforces the proposition that an architectural intent for adaptive complex systems requires some sort of hierarchical layered structure (according to the holon abstraction as an approach to restraining software complexity).